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Combined and Uneven Development in the Men's Clothing Industry

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 June 2012

Steven Fraser
Steven Fraser
Affiliation:
Steven Fraser is a senior editor at Basic Books, Inc.
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Abstract

By the 1920s the production of men's clothing was clearly divided into two sectors. The first consisted of a relative handful of large firms, technologically and organizationally sophisticated and engaged in the manufacture of better-quality garments. The “secondary sector” included a great many small and technically more primitive enterprises producing mainly lower-priced and lower-quality clothing. In this article, Dr. Fraser examines the development of the industry from the period following the Civil War through the post-World War I era in order to explain why this dualistic industrial structure emerged. In so doing, he draws on a thesis developed by Michael Piore and Alfred Chandler regarding the relationship between industrial organization and the structure of the market. Fraser argues that the expansion of the mass market does not necessarily lead to the concentration of production. It may, on the contrary, and especially in those cases where demand is particularly unstable, encourage the growth of a “secondary sector” whose minimal fixed investment makes it well-suited to handle the more variable component of demand.

Type
Research Article
Information
Business History Review , Volume 57 , Issue 4 , Winter 1983 , pp. 522 - 547
Copyright
Copyright © The President and Fellows of Harvard College 1983

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References

1 Pope, Eliphalet, The Clothing Industry in New York (Columbia, Missouri, 1905)Google Scholar is still the best single history of the industry in the nineteenth century and includes a partial description of its earlier, dualistic structure; Corbin, Harry A., The Men's Clothing Industry: Colonial Times Through Modern Times (New York, 1970)Google Scholar, while authored by a former executive secretary of the Clothing Manufacturers Association, provides a fairly balanced account; Carpenter, Jesse Thomas, Competition and Collective Bargaining in the Needle Trades, 1910–67 (Ithaca, 1972)Google Scholar, and Seidman, Joel, The Needle Trades (New York, 1942)Google Scholar are both principally concerned with the evolution of labor relations in the industry, but include detailed descriptions of the structure of the industry; Nystrom, Paul, The Economics of Fashion (New York, 1928)Google Scholar examines the relationship between changes in the structure of the industry and the development of the mass market; Popkin, Martin E., Organization, Management, and Technology in the Manufacture of Men's Clothing (New York, 1929)Google Scholar is especially useful on the relationship between technological innovation and changes in industrial organization. The literature on the Jewish labor movement, too vast for inclusion here, almost invariably contains valuable discussions of the clothing industry, indispensable for a complete picture of the industry's evolution.

The industry examples are taken from Chandler, Alfred, The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge, 1977), 287, 289, 298, 308–09, 312.Google Scholar

2 Chandler, The Visible Hand, 442; Piore, Michael, Birds of Passage and Promised Lands: Long Distance Migrants and industrial Societies (Cambridge, 1981)Google Scholar; Piore, Michael, “The Technological Foundations of Dualism and Discontinuity,” in Berger, Suzanne and Piore, Michael, Dualism and Discontinuity in Industrial Societies (Cambridge, 1981), 65–68, 79Google Scholar; Sabel, Charles, Work and Politics: The Division of Labor in Industry (Cambridge, 1982)CrossRefGoogle Scholar further develops this argument to explain the historical evolution of labor organization and labor politics.

3 Howe, Irving, World of Our Fathers: The Journey of East European Jews to America and the World They Found and Made (New York, 1976)Google Scholar; Passero, Rosara Lucy, “Ethnicity in the Men's Ready-Made Clothing Industry, 1880–1950: The Italian Experience in Philadelphia” (Ph. D. dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 1978), 110–12, 163Google Scholar; Weil, Gordon, Sears, Roebuck, U.S.A. (New York, 1977), 42–43Google Scholar; Ewen, Stuart and Ewen, Elizabeth, Channels of Desire: Mass Images and the Shaping of American Consciousness (New York, 1982), 178.Google Scholar These developments in the men's clothing industry occurred at least ten to fifteen years before similar changes in the ladies' garment industry—see Rischin, Moses, The Promised City: New York's Jews, 1870–1914 (New York, 1962), 255.Google Scholar

4 Nystrom, The Economics of Fashion, 409–10; Pope, The Clothing Industry in New York, 12, 15–16, 18; Weil, Sears, Roebuck, U.S.A., 42.

5 Nystrom, The Economics of Fashion, 441ff.; Arnold, Pauline and White, Percival, Clothes and Cloth: America's Apparel Buy (New York, 1961), 84Google Scholar; Feldman, Egal, Fit for Men: A Study of New York's Clothing Industry (Washington, D.C., 1960), 48.Google Scholar

6 Greenfield, Judith, “The Role of the Jews in the Development of the Clothing Industry in the U.S.,” YIVO Annual of Jewish Social Science, 2–3 (1947–1948) 180–204Google Scholar; Zaretz, Charles Elbert, The Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America: A Study in Progressive Trade Unionism (New York, 1934), 37–38Google Scholar; Arnold and White, Clothes and Cloth, 91.

7 While the number of shops declined from 7,858 to 6,166, invested capital increased by 59 percent, the value of product grew to $209.5 million, and the number of employees by 48.7 percent from 108,000 in 1869 to 160,813 by 1880. Nystrom, The Economics of Fashion, 412, 415–16; Zaretz, The Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, 35–40; Foreign and Domestic Commerce Bureau, Department of Commerce, Miscellaneous Series #34, The Men's Factory-Made Clothing Industry—Report on the Costs of Production of Men's Factory-Made Clothing in the U.S. (hereafter, Report on Costs of Production), (1916), 21–22; Report on the Conditions of Women and Child Wage-Earners in the U.S. (hereafter, Report on Conditions), volume 2, Men's Ready-Made Clothing. Sen. Doc. 645, 61st Cong., 2nd sess., (1911) 486–87.

8 Corbin, The Men's Clothing Industry, 40–15; Pope, The Clothing Industry in New York, 25, 28, 77–78; Report on Costs of Production, 253–61; Passero, “Ethnicity in the Men's Ready-Made Clothing Industry,” 22–23; Popkin, Organization, Management, and Technology, 19, 114; Report on Conditions, 494. The first sewing machines were of course foot-powered and were capable of 800 to 900 stitches per minute. Between 1870 and 1875 the long knife replaced the old cutters' shears and made possible the production of 100 pairs of pants in three hours rather than seventeen. The first steam-powered cutters appeared in the eighties and by 1892 rotary machines weighing less than thirty-five pounds and run by electricity dominated the industry. Gas motors were specifically adapted for use in small shops, and subsequent developments in electrical motor construction in the nineties made possible the production of small, portable, and reciprocating electrical knives. The first pressing iron, the “tailor's goose,” was a cumbersome object heated over an open stove. The blower iron was introduced later for “off” or final pressing, and for the heavy labor of under-pressing, high-powered machines attached to moveable arms were designed. While these machines improved costs and productivity, they remained heavy and sometimes dangerous as was the case with gas irons that inside contained a potentially explosive flaming vapor.

9 Pope, The Clothing Industry in New York, 56; Report on Costs of Production, 13; Report on Conditions, 422–23. The gradual mechanization of the industry, along with the development of the contracting system and home-finishing eroded the basis of the domestic system so that it was practically extinct by the mid-1890s. Vestiges survived only among certain ethnic groups, Germans and Bohemians particularly, who were by long tradition accustomed to this sort of home production. Rischin, The Promised City, 26, 45; Mendelsohn, Ezra, The Class Struggle in the Pale: The Formative Years of the Jewish Workers Movement in Tsarist Russia (Cambridge, 1970), 6–17Google Scholar, 59, 64, 82, 85; Howe, World of Our Fathers, passim, Tobias, Henry, The Jewish Bund in Russia: From Its Origins to 1905 (Stanford, 1972), 7–8Google Scholar; Cahan, Abraham, The Rise of David Levinsky (New York, 1917, reprinted 1960)Google Scholar vividly depicts the competitive ethos and intra-ethnic antagonisms that permeated the industry; Epstein, Melech, Jewish Labor in the U.S.A. (New York, 1970), 94–100.Google Scholar

10 Elias Tcherikower, The Early Jewish Labor Movement in the U.S., translated and revised by Antonovsky (New York, YIVO Archives), Table 13, 360, based on the U.S. Bureau of the Census, Twelfth Census of the United States, Census of Manufacturing, Pt. e, Selected Industries (Washington, 1902), 261Google Scholar, and Table 14, Growth of the Men's Clothing Industry, 1880–90, 361; Greenfield, The Role of the Jews; Report on Costs of Production, 21; Report of the Committee on Manufactures on the “Sweating System,” (hereafter. Swearing System), January 20, 1893, House of Representatives, 52nd Cong., 2nd sess., 228. The value of the industry's product rose to $441.5 million of which ready-made production accounted for $251 million; the number of wage-earners increased by 85.8 percent; value added grew from $78 million in 1879 to $122 million in 1889, but only by an additional $11 million during the next decade.

11 Rischin, The Promised City, 64–67; Report on Conditions, 416–17. The contracting system was widely used through the period of World War I in a host of industries including machine tools and armaments. But in these instances the main incentive was to free the primary producer from technical problems by farming out the work to master mechanics, often employed on the premises—see Buttrick, John, “The Inside Contract System,” Journal of Economic History 12 (Summer 1952).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

12 Report on Costs of Production, 154–57; Men's Garment Trades of New York City, Final Report and Testimony Submitted to Congress by the Committee on Industrial Relations, Vol. 2, Sen. Doc. 415, 64th Cong., 1st sess., (1916), 1,976, 1,984–85; Report on Conditions, 417–19; Corbin, 31–39; Chicago Examiner, 26 April 1911; Hower, Ralph M., History of Macy's of New; York, 1858–1919 (Cambridge, 1943), 111, 163, 244–51.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

13 Rischin, The Promised City, 62–65; Greenfield, The Role of the Jews, Epstein, Jewish Labor in the U.S.A., 98–100; Report on Costs of Production, 12–13; Passero, “Ethnicity in the Men's Ready-Made Clothing Industry,” 143–49.

14 Howe, World of Our Fathers, 154–55, 156–59; Ewen and Ewen, Channels of Desire, 179; Passero, “Ethnicity in the Ready-Made Men's Clothing Industry,” 110–12; Soule, George, The New Unionism in the Clothing Industry (New York, 1920), 33–37.Google Scholar The U.S. Census of Manufacturing for 1914 contains the statistical data on the value of annual product, the size distribution of enterprises by number of employees, etc.; Seidman, The Needle Trades, 13–17; Meyers, Robert J. and Bloch, Joseph W., “The Men's Clothing Industry” in How Collective Bargaining Works: A Factual Survey of Labor-Management Relations in Leading American Industries (New York, 1942), 388Google Scholar; Report on Costs of Production, 157–58; Report on Conditions, 441.

The men's clothing trade continued to be the most highly capitalized branch of the garment industry as it was less vulnerable to shifts in fashion and frequent changes in the channels of distribution than was the women's wear branch of the industry.

It is important to note that Census figures often undercounted the number of “inside contractors” who worked exclusively for one manufacturer, often on the same premises, and the number of subcontractors who performed only a portion of the work, although it is also true that the latter were largely eliminated by the depression of the 1890s. Also notoriously difficult to estimate was the extent of homework, usually involving any one of a number of hand operations. The “corporation” or “social” shops, owned and operated by workers who divided the earnings and often employed other workers at substandard rates also escaped the Census enumeration. Moreover, the variety of production arrangements suggested above may serve as a reminder that, at least through the turn of the century, a significant portion of garment manufacturing occurred neither in “inside” factories nor in contractor and small shops. Much of the industry's output was produced in tenement house sweatshops where the “task system” prevailed as well at wages 25 percent lower than the rest of the industry and for as much as eighteen hours per day, while managing to resist all legislative efforts to abolish the system. Indeed, in 1911, there were still 13,000 tenement houses licensed for homework in New York by the Bureau of Factory Inspection. See Seidman, The Needle Trades, 61–63; Epstein, Jewish Labor in the U.S.A., 94–100; Report on Conditions, 414, 419, 496, 498, 503; Sweating System, introduction to report; Howe, World of Our Fathers, 156–60.

While the internal fragmentation of the industry proceeded in all these ways, it is important to keep in mind that its aggregate size continued to grow impressively. The number of wage earners increased by 65 percent between 1899 and 1909, while the value of the industry's output rose by 132 percent, its cost of materials by 92 percent and wages by 95 percent with the greatest period of expansion of output occurring from 1899 to 1909, much of it accounted for by the growth of the “inside shop.” On this see Report on Conditions, 13; Soule, The New Unionism in the Clothing Industry, 30–31, 33–34, 37; Report on Costs of Production, 21–22.

However, despite the steady growth of “inside” production, the industry continued to nourish petty entrepreneurial activity. According to the 1914 Census, there were 1,663 firms with an annual product of less than $5,000; 3,098 establishments producing between $5,000 and $20,000; 3,496 between $20,000 and $100,000. More than one-half as many workers were employed by firms with an annual output of less than $100,000. Only twelve firms employed over 1,000 people; thirty-six companies employed between 500 and 1,000 people; 97 employed between 251 and 500; and 423 had a work force between 100 and 250. On this see Soule, The New Unionism in the Clothing Industry, 33–34.

15 Morris Cooke, “The Men's Ready-Made Clothing Industry,” report appearing in Waste in Industry, study prepared by the Committee on Elimination of Waste in Industry of the Federated American Engineering Societies (hereafter, Waste in Industry), (Washington, 1921), 113; “Collective Bargaining: Production Standards—Special Problems, 1919,” and testimony of Sidney Hillman and David Wolf, Joint Conference of the American Men's and Boy's Clothing Manufacturers Association and the ACWA, January, 1919, Papers of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America (hereafter, ACW Papers), Labor-Management Documentation Center of the Martin P. Catherwood Library of the New York State School of Industrial and Labor Relations, Cornell University; Felix Frankfurter and Samuel Rosensohn, “Survey of the New York Clothing Industry,” May 6, 1920, ACW Papers; Seidman, The Needle Trades, 11, 13, 17.

16 Chandler, The Visible Hand, 238–39, 365; incidentally, Chandler's observation about the need for a high volume of throughput to move continuously through a plant in order to maximize the profitable use of fixed capital, materials, and energy was not unknown to the most modern clothing factories and their managements. N.I. Stone, labor manager for Hickey-Freeman, an elite Rochester firm, made precisely this observation in a report prepared for the National Bureau of Economic Research on “Business Cycles and Unemployment” in 1923. Stone noted that the normal pattern of intermittent seasonal production was not only socially harmful, but also bad for businessmen who might otherwise benefit from continuous operations, especially those with “plants having a large overhead expense, a considerable part of which is in the nature of fixed charges which cannot be eliminated while the plant is temporarily shut down.” As quoted in the Daily News Record (hereafter DNR), 3 November 1923.

17 Report on Costs of Production, 18–19, 155–57; Cooke, Waste in industry.

18 Ewen and Ewen, Channels of Desire, 116, 161, 178; Nystrom, The Economics of Fashion, 26.

19 Report on Conditions, 438, 439–40; Popkin, Organization, Management, and Technohgy, 21–22.

20 Passero, “Ethnicity in the Men's Ready-Made Clothing Industry,” 117, 148–50; “From Pain to Victory,” Labor Age (May 1924); Liptzin, Sam, Tales of a Tailor (New York, 1965), 26, 65–70.Google Scholar During the period extending from the 1890s to the outbreak of the war, mechanization extended its reach as well as its capacities. In the 1890s, the introduction of electrically powered straight knives and circular blades permitted a sizeable increase in the height of the cutters' “lay.” Gas, electric, and finally steam-powered pressing machines supplanted the heavy “tailor's goose” and were accompanied by the invention of specialized pressing equipment. Sewing machinery improved in speed and by 1914 could simulate most hand operations. And apart from strictly technical advances, the extent of the division of labor continued to develop so that, for example, the sixty-two separate operations it took to make a suit coat in 1913 had become 117 by 1929. On these developments see Howe, World of Our Fathers, 150–55; Nystrom The Economics of Fashion, 397–98; Pope, The Clothing Industry in New York, 77–78; Report on Costs of Production, 253–61; Passero, “Ethnicity in the Men's Ready-Made Clothing Industry,” 122–25.

21 Nystrom, The Economics of Fashion, 415–18.

22 Report on Costs of Production, 146–48; DNR, November 3, 1923; Corbin, The Men's Clothing Industry, 119–23; Zaretz, The Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, 42; “From Pain to Victory”; “Clothing Data – Comparison with Other Industries,” and “Memo on Costs of Production and Profits,” ACW Papers. Raw materials and labor costs represented the two principal costs of doing business, with materials on average accounting for 50 percent and labor ranging from 13 percent to 37 percent of costs.

Smaller enterprises could on occasion buy raw materials less expensively than their larger competitors, since they could take advantage of sharp market fluctuations in the textile industry to secure goods at distress prices. This illustrates again that great degree of flexibility characteristic of the “secondary sector” able to function with irregular materials and older machinery that might have paralyzed an enterprise more committed to standardized mass production.

See also Nystrom, The Economics of Fashion, 415–20. The growth of national advertising and the use of the trademark lent the market some uniformity and stability. And periodically, the industry's manufacturing elite made deliberate and collective efforts to stabilize the market, but success was fleeting at best.

23 Cooke, Waste in Industry; “Collective Bargaining: Production Standards—Special Problems,” 1919, ACW Papers; Frankfurter and Rosensohn, “Survey of the New York Clothing Industry,” ACW Papers; “Reports on Working Conditions, 1920,” ACW Papers; Zaretz, The Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, 29–31; DiVK, November 3, 1923; Report of Costs of Production, 44, 146, 150–51. The average rate of plant utilization was 69 percent and at the trough of the stack season 80 percent of the industry's resources lay fellow.

24 Report on Conditions, 18–19; “Homework and Other Problems,” ACW Papers; Zaretz, The Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, 42; Cooke, Waste in Industry, 95; Meyers and Bloch, “The Men's Clothing Industry,” 390.

25 Zaretz, The Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, 48; Documentary History of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America (hereafter Doc. Hist.), 1924–26, ACW Papers; Seidman, The Needle Trades, 7, 10.

26 Report on Conditions, 26, 27, 29, 31–32; Passero, “Ethnicity in the Men's Ready-Made Clothing Industry,” 162–64, 272–76.

27 Report on Conditions, 23–25; Meyers, Howard Barton, “The Policing of Labor Disputes in Chicago: A Case Study,” (Ph. D. dissertation) University of Chicago, 1929.Google Scholar A rather informal collection of letters, financial data, account books, clippings, and employee records are housed at Hart Schaffner and Marx headquarters in Chicago, which company officials kindly allowed me to examine (hereafter HSM Papers). “HSM Labor Relations” folder, ACW Papers; Corbin, The Men's Clothing Industry, 128.

28 Report on Conditions, 441; Zaretz, The Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, 52; “From Pain to Victory”; Passero, “Ethnicity in the Men's Ready-Made Clothing Industry,” 162–66; “Experience with Trade Union Agreements—Clothing Industries,” National Industrial Conference Board Report #38, (New York, 1921); Popkin, Organization, Management, and Technology, 22–23.

29 Passero, “Ethnicity in the Men's Ready-Made Clothing Industry,” 162–64; “From Pain to Victory”; “Experience with Trade Union Agreements—Clothing Industries”; Popkin, Organization, Management and Technology, 21. Recession and mergers, along with a shift to other items of conspicuous consumption like radios and autos helped cause the number of firms to decline from 4,024 to 3,691 between 1923 and 1929. Moreover, producers of high-quality goods were hit particularly hard, forcing some to close and others like Hart Schafiher and Marx to undertake production of whole new, lower-priced product lines. More generally, the conditions that made the decade a particularly difficult period included technological displacement of workers, fashion changes, and runaway plants avoiding higher labor costs, taxes, and seeking raw materials. On these developments see London Statist, 1 January 1929; “Membership Data by Industry,” ACW Papers; Meyers and Bloch, “The Men's Clothing Industry,” 383–85; Doc Hist., 1922–24, ACW Papers; Earl Dean Howard to Sidney Hillman, 24 January 1924; Howard to Hillman, 8 January 1925; Hillman to Howard, 2 February 1925; Howard to Hillman, 28 November 1925—all in Chicago Joint Board Records, 1925, ACW Papers; Nystrom, The Economics of Fashion, 339–47, 417–18, 420–23, 425–28, 430, 435; Corbin, The Men's Clothing Industry, 150–51; Brandes, Joseph, “From Sweatshop to Stability: Jewish Labor Between Two World Wars,” YIVO Annual of Jewish Social Science 16 (1976) 37–40.Google Scholar

30 Passero, “Ethnicity in the Men's Ready-Made Clothing Industry,” 15; Chicago Examiner, 4 April 1911; HSM Papers; Corbin, The Men's Clothing Industry, 31–39; Fraser, Steve, “Dress Rehearsal for the New Deal: Shopfloor Insurgents, Political Elites, and Industrial Democracy in the Amalgamated Clothing Workers,” in Frisch, Michael and Walkowitz, Daniel, eds., Working Class America: Essays on the History of Labor, Community, and American Society (Urbana, 1983).Google Scholar

31 “HSM Labor Relations” folder, ACW Papers; Meyers, “The Policing of Labor Disputes in Chicago”; “Homework and Other Problems in Wages, Hours, and Working Conditions,” ACW Papers; Meyers and Bloch, “The Men's Clothing Industry”; Fraser, “Dress Rehearsal for the New Deal”; Donald B. Strauss, “Causes of Industrial Peace Under Collective Bargaining—Hickey-Freeman Company and the ACWA,” National Planning Association, Washington, D.C., Case Study #4, 1949; Zaretz, The Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, 138–39; “Talk to the Foremen of Hickey-Freeman Co.” by labor manager Meyer Jacobstein, February 1919, ACW Papers; “Organizing Efforts at Joseph and Feiss,” (Cleveland, 1916), ACW Papers.

32 Fraser, “Dress Rehearsal for the New Deal.”

33 It might be argued that the distinction between “modern” and “premodern” is confusing or even anachronistic, especially since the latter developed after the initial emergence of the factory system. I think it appropriate, however, since the forms of production referred to were in fact borrowed or imported more or less directly from an earlier era of handicraft production. Moreover, they were strikingly at odds with those trends in technology, organization of production, and management that have especially characterized the progressive development of industry in America. In certain European contexts, where the industrial evolution took a different direction in which artisanal forms of production not only persisted but were often the incubators of technological and other innovations, the use of the term “premodern” would undoubtedly be less appropriate.